Company Update (NASDAQ:AMD): Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Releases New Version of Open Compute Platform

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD) announced a new release of Radeon Open Compute Platform (ROCm) featuring software support of new Radeon GPU hardware, new math libraries, and a rich foundation of modern programming languages, designed to speed development of high-performance, energy-efficient heterogeneous computing systems. AMD also announced planned support of OpenCL™ and for a wide range of CPUs in upcoming releases of ROCm, including support for AMD’s upcoming “Zen”-based CPUs, Cavium ThunderX CPUs, and IBM Power 8 CPUs. The advances further cement ROCm’s position as the most versatile open source platform for GPU computing.

“Radeon Open Compute is a platform for a new era of GPU problem-solving, designed to harness the power of open source software to unlock new solutions for HPC and hyperscale computing,” said Raja Koduri, senior vice president and chief architect, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD. “Today’s release of ROCm gives developers consummate flexibility in where and how they use GPU compute. We’re excited to show off some of these incredible applications at SC16.”

“An open source approach to heterogeneous computing can help bring the benefits of high-performance computing directly to developers, providing the flexibility for them to use available compute resources and extract the best possible performance from their available hardware,” said Denise Dumas, vice president, Platform Engineering, Red Hat. “As a leader in helping to nurture and maintain open source communities, we are pleased to see that AMD has elected to take a community-focused approach to ROCm.”

“The combination of AMD’s GPU support of ThunderX® along with the breadth of features of the ROCm software release is a valuable addition to Cavium’s overall solution for the HPC and Hyperscale server market,” said Larry Wikelius, Vice President of the Software Ecosystem and Solutions Group at Cavium, Inc. “Today’s announcement by AMD is an excellent complement to the innovative features of ThunderX® that include 48 ARMv8 cores, integrated I/O and dual socket configuration support that our customers and partners are deploying today in these markets”

The new release of ROCm introduces a wide range of updates, including:

Expanded GPU support – ROCm now supports all Polaris architecture-based graphics products, including the Radeon™ RX 460, 470 and 480 graphics cards, and the Radeon™ Pro WX 7100, 5100 and 4100 GPUs, growing the rich portfolio of devices supported by ROCm devices. The Polaris architecture is specifically designed to benefit low-level programming, helping developers to extract the most from the hardware.

Heterogeneous Compute Compiler (HCC) – HCC is a single source ISO C++ 11/14 compiler for both CPU and GPU, with support for the C++17 “Parallel Standard Template Library”. It is built on a rich compiler infrastructure including LLVM-based GCN ISA code generation with assembler and disassembler support.

Heterogeneous-Compute Interface for Portability (HIP) – HIP enables developers to port CUDA applications to ROCm using HIPIFY which automates the conversion to the HIP kernel language and runtime API, creating portable applications that can run on virtually any GPU using either NVIDIA’s CUDA Compiler or HCC.

New Math Acceleration Libraries – ROCm introduces support for new advanced math acceleration libraries with support for BLAS, FFT and N-dimensional tensor contractions. (Original Source)

Shares of Advanced Micro Devices are currently trading at $6.72, up $0.04 or 0.55%. AMD has a 1-year high of $8.00 and a 1-year low of $1.75. The stock’s 50-day moving average is $6.71 and its 200-day moving average is $5.65.

On the ratings front, AMD stock has been the subject of a number of recent research reports. In a report issued on October 21, Mizuho analyst Vijay Rakesh reiterated a Hold rating on AMD, with a price target of $7, which represents a slight upside potential from current levels. Separately, on the same day, Jefferies Co.’s Mark Lipacis reiterated a Buy rating on the stock and has a price target of $9.

According to TipRanks.com, which ranks over 7,500 financial analysts and bloggers to gauge the performance of their past recommendations, Vijay Rakesh and Mark Lipacis have a yearly average return of 24.7% and 23.5% respectively. Rakesh has a success rate of 70% and is ranked #17 out of 4209 analysts, while Lipacis has a success rate of 76% and is ranked #6.

Sentiment on the street is mostly neutral on AMD stock. Out of 16 analysts who cover the stock, 9 suggest a Hold rating , 5 suggest a Buy and 2 recommend to Sell the stock. The 12-month average price target assigned to the stock is $6.82, which represents a slight upside potential from current levels.

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. is a global semiconductor company that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. It design and integrate technology for intelligent devices, including personal computers, game consoles and cloud servers. The company operates through the following segments: Computing and Graphics, and Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom. The Computing and Graphics segment includes desktop, notebook processors, chipsets, discrete GPUs and professional graphics. The Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom segment includes server and embedded processors, dense servers, semi-custom SoC products, engineering services and royalties.